'Are you Aryan?'

Antony Beevor reviews Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.

BISMARK once remarked that moral courage was a rare enough virtue in his country, but it completely deserted a German "the moment that he puts on a uniform". Sebastian Haffner, who died in 1999, shows in this remarkable memoir how it also deserted Germany's professional middle class.

In 1933 the fear of opposing authority and being labelled a traitor extended well beyond the traditional military caste. Judges consented to the law being turned inside out and upside down as the criminals took over the state. Professors seemed to fall over each other to spurn Jewish colleagues and support the new regime that believed in burning books. And news editors did not merely exert self-censorship, they felt compelled to use the deliberately distorting cliches of the propaganda ministry. Sebastian Haffner sets out to explain the process through his own observations and experiences as a young man.

As a schoolboy during the First World War, Haffner, the son of an upright and austere Prussian civil servant, had been a fervent believer in "final victory". The announcement in November 1918 of the Armistice came as a traumatic shock. The boy felt turned to stone. Hitler, that same day, returned to his bed and hid under the blankets.

The proto-fascist Freikorps, which the Social Democrat government used to destroy the revolutionary uprisings of 1919, were the forerunners of the SA. Haffner calls it "Nazism without Hitler". The casual brutality of Right-wing students produced the assassination of the brilliant Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in 1922. The following year, the vertiginous inflation and collapse of the mark sapped morals as well as political confidence. The old and the unworldly were driven to begging or to suicide, while young men made fortunes speculating in shares.

Economic stability returned with the Rentenmark, but Haffner argues that this period of boredom was dangerous. Young men, who lacked satisfaction in their lives and had missed service in the First World War, sought excitement through political confrontation.

A craze for sporting activity followed: a sort of Strength and Joy through Sport, which the other outstanding politician of the time, Gustav Stresemann, described cynically as "the new aristocracy of the biceps". He provoked much ill-will by this levity. His sudden death and the brutal economic policies of Chancellor Bruning weakened the democratic body politic even more.

Unemployment soared with the onset of an international depression, and in the Reichstag elections of 1930 the Nazis went from a dozen to 107 seats. As Haffner observes, a large minority of Germans lacked not just judgement, but also an ability to sniff out the fact that something was dangerously corrupt in the Nazi Party. They were encouraged to welcome "decisive measures" to protect them - telephone tapping, mass arrests and concentration camps.

The Nazis, even in the elections of 1933, never exceeded 44 per cent of the vote, yet the leaders of the remaining 56 per cent did little to oppose them. The rump of the Social Democrats expressed their confidence in Reich Chancellor Hitler and sang the Horst Wessel song.

In April, Goebbels announced the boycott of the Jews. Haffner, in this painfully honest account, describes how as a young court official he was challenged by SA storm-troopers who had arrived to throw out Jewish lawyers. "Are you Aryan?" he was asked. "Yes," he replied instinctively. Even though it was the truth, he despised himself for agreeing to answer such an essentially obscene question. That night, he went with his Jewish girlfriend Charlie to the Katakombe cabaret. There, the sole resistance to the Nazis in Berlin seemed to continue in the gentle satire of the comic actor Werner Finke. The brown uniforms swamping the streets were "like an army of occupation".

This book, like the diaries of Viktor Klemperer, shows that one can often learn far more about the psychological collapse of decent Germany from the observations of a sharp-eyed and honest witness than from thousands of pages of academic analysis years after the event. A Wehrmacht general staff colonel said to me recently: "Almost everyone knows the history of Germany from 1945 to 1933, but few know it from 1933 to 1945." Although this argument is often used, with different degrees of disingenuousness, by the veterans of the wartime generation, it is still a valid point.

This account, written in 1939 during Haffner's exile in England, and hidden away until a couple of years ago, provides an astonishingly effective and well-written explanation of how the Nazis managed so easily to exploit Germany's psychological weaknesses, with such devastating results for everyone.